General Mills delivered its June 24 earnings report, and the data that followed tells a pointed story: shorts added rather than retreated, options hedging ticked up, and the analyst community remains firmly in trim-target mode.
Short interest has climbed further since the pre-earnings note. The position now runs at 9.4% of the free float — up from roughly 8.8% in the prior article — with about 50 million shares short. That is a 15% increase over the past month, and the weekly build of 1.8% shows no sign of covering. The bears are not running. What has changed is the lending market: availability has tightened noticeably, dropping from around 253% last week to 178% today. That is still within a normal range — more than one-and-a-half shares available for every one already borrowed — so there is no mechanical squeeze pressure, but the direction is worth watching. The cost to borrow has also crept up 13% over the past month to 0.57%, still low in absolute terms but moving in a consistent direction alongside the rising short count.
Options positioning has turned somewhat more cautious since the pre-earnings reading. The put/call ratio of 0.86 now runs above its 20-day average of 0.82, a modest but clear shift from the 0.78 reading just before the print. The z-score of 1.25 is not extreme — the 52-week high on the PCR is 1.18, which the current level has not yet breached — but the directional move since earnings confirms that options traders are adding protection rather than unwinding it.
The Street has been uniformly moving in one direction for weeks, and nothing has reversed that. Morgan Stanley cut to $32 and JPMorgan to $31 in early June, both maintaining Underweight. UBS holds a Sell with a $30 target. Bank of America took its target down from $42 to $36 in late May while staying Neutral. The mean price target across the analyst community is $37 — about 7.5% above the current price of $34.43 — which sounds constructive until you note that the lone bull in the mix, Piper Sandler at Overweight, is working with a $41 target set in mid-May. Most of the Street's "upside" is concentrated in a single outlier. The bears' case centres on soft retail volumes, persistent pricing and promotional pressure, and a pet food segment facing structural inventory headwinds. Bulls point to the brand portfolio — Cheerios, Nature Valley, Blue Buffalo, Pillsbury — and argue margins can recover. The ORTEX short score has climbed to 64.3 from 59.7 ten days ago, now ranking in the bottom 10th percentile for short score across the universe.
The earnings history provides a relevant data point. The March 2026 print produced a 3.2% one-day decline and a 6.6% five-day loss. The June print has now been released, and the post-report short build suggests the market reaction — whatever its scale — did not shake the bears loose. Institutional ownership remains heavily concentrated in passive and index holders: BlackRock at 11.4%, State Street at 6.4%, and the two primary Vanguard entities together at roughly 11.7%. Active managers in the top-holder list are thin. Insider activity has been one-directional too, with the HR Director and a divisional President selling in May at prices near current levels; net insider activity over the past 90 days reflects modest net selling.
The stock is up 3.3% on the day and essentially flat on the week, a move that peers like CAG (+4.5% on the day) and CPB (+4.0%) have broadly matched — suggesting today's bounce is a sector lift rather than a GIS-specific re-rating. The question now is whether that short base at 9.4% of float continues to build as post-earnings details digest, or whether even a neutral reaction prompts some trimming into a stock that has lost more than a quarter of its value from its late-2025 highs.
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